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Archives Highlights - Books
Philosophical Babies, Arrogant Adults – September 18, 2009
Alison Gopnik has a
new book out entitled The Philosophical Baby (Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2009). I’ve been too busy doing magazine layout, trying to keep up with
twitter and facebook, and finishing off about four other books to get very far
into it yet. But it promises to be fascinating and wide-ranging. And I am not
surprised. I first came across Gopnik’s work when I was doing research for my
2000 book
Challenging Assumptions in Education. She had just released a research study
that she co-authored, entitled The Scientist in the Crib (William Morrow,
1999). Her research found that babies’ brains are smarter, faster, more flexible
and busier than adults.’ She wrote that, contrary to traditional beliefs about
children, toddlers think in a logical manner, arriving at abstract principles
early and quickly. “They think, draw conclusions, make predictions, look for
explanations and even do experiments,” I quoted her as saying. Educated in
Canada and the UK, she is now a professor of psychology at the University of
California, Berkeley. And in this book, she continues to describe how babies are
smarter, more imaginative and more conscious than adults. We really do need to
get over our arrogance.
Posted: 2009/09/18 4:14 PM
Speed
Reading – August 4, 2009
I’ve been playing around with Twitter as a tool for making more connections and
telling more people about our work (http://twitter.com/WendyPriesnitz,
http://twitter.com/NaturalLifeMag, and
http://twitter.com/AlternatePress). True to my original concern about
signing on to it, it’s fast. It requires me to write quickly, to post quickly,
to keep checking other people’s tweets and to respond quickly. Otherwise, there
seems to be no point. Unfortunately, I’m a relatively slow thinker and writer,
so I’m feeling the pressure, even though I’m intrigued by the platform and think
it could be a good thing for us. And what if it isn’t even about the content? It
might be mostly about the connections – the networking. It makes me think about
a book published a few years ago by Pierre Bayard, a professor of French
literature at the University of Paris. In English, it was entitled
How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (Bloomsbury USA, 2007).
Bayard’s thesis seems to be that the associations that tie books together – book
as a system – are more important than the actual content of the books. And that,
in one sense, is what Twitter is doing – giving participants a speed reading
version of what’s out there and how it all relates in the overall scheme of
things. James Harkin expands on this idea in his book Lost in Cyburbia
(Knopf Canada, 2009), connecting social media to systems theory and Marshall
McLuhan’s idea about the medium being the message. This is all very depressing
for a writer and editor, but I’m willing to go along for the ride awhile longer
and see if Twitter helps me connect with more readers. The kind who read books
and magazines.
Posted: 2009/08/04 11:11 AM
Change
For the Sake of Our Children – July 27, 2009
Léandre Bergeron is a parent, social activist and writer whose
article in the upcoming September/October issue of Natural Life
magazine illuminates the respectful, trusting way of parenting and educating
children that I’ve practiced and championed for the past 35 years. Léandre
suggests that we treat our children as “distinguished guests” – people we
respect and admire for who they are and who grace us with their presence. He has
much more wisdom and experience to share in his new book
For the Sake of Our Children, which we’ve just published and is now back
from the printer and ready to be ordered.
Collectively, we have much work to do to own up to the damage
our society does to our children through the ways we parent and educate. I
sometimes wonder if we are willing to make the sweeping changes in our
institutions, public policies and personal lives that are necessary to reverse
that harm to our children and to our society. But, recently, as I was listening
to an album of old tunes by singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen, I felt grateful for
the increasing community of people who are pushing for those changes. We are, to
paraphrase a line from Cohen’s song Anthem, taking advantage of the cracks that
appear in everything, which is where the light gets in.
Posted: 2009/07/27 12:14 PM
A Life of Learning – July 15, 2009
Now that the book Turning Points: 27 Visionaries in Education Tell Their Own
Stories (2009, Alternative Education Resource Organization) has been
published, I have posted my contribution
A Life of Learning:Empowering, Respecting, Trusting, Unschooling Children on
this website. Enjoy!
Posted: 2009/07/15 6:19 PM
Business That's Small, Local and Personal – March 7, 2009
A certain website recently refused to accept a review copy of one of our books
because we don’t sell on amazon.com and they therefore wouldn’t have an
opportunity to earn their affiliate commission if they reviewed it. I have to
wonder about the editorial integrity of websites (or magazines) that only report
on things from which they make money, but that is just one of the effects of
those massive, centralized, deep discount retailers. And that’s why I don’t sell
to or buy from them.
One of the sustainability-focused foundations of our philosophy
of doing
business and living life is to help foster local self-reliance. Another
thing that’s important to us is that small is beautiful. And a third is that the
personal is political.
So whenever possible, we support local small businesses rather
than large, faceless corporations. Independent booksellers can’t compete on
price with the mega bookstores, online or otherwise. And often, people will take
advantage of the local store’s great customer service and knowledge of books to
choose titles, then go save some money online. Amazon is huge (one-quarter
of the US market) and getting larger all the time. It recently took over the
British Columbia-based used and rare bookseller
AbeBooks and also now owns a number of other companies, including
Chrislands, which helps booksellers – including those who like to think
they’re independent – create their own websites. The U.K.’s Independent
Booksellers’ Network calls it
“Amazon Eats the Bookselling World.”
I can’t
fault anybody – especially these days – for trying to save a few dollars. But
the independent retailers, book publishers and even authors and readers suffer
from deep discounting.
Like other businesses, many book publishers – even the big ones – are hurting
these days, with some postponing their Spring lists, others laying off staff and
a few hanging on by their fingernails. I fear that the continuing race to the
bottom created by the demands of the mega retailers will ultimately mean fewer
and poorer quality books published.
But wait a minute, you say. Most small and self-publishers need
amazon and their ilk to sell books, even if they’re treated poorly. And many of
the bloggers who review books are running small, often home-based and mom-run,
businesses and depend on the affiliate revenue to pay their bills. Fortunately,
there are alternatives. For instance, the American Booksellers Association
(whose membership has plummeted to about 1,800 members from more than 4,000 15
years ago) recently created a book-linking feature called
IndieBound
that bloggers can use to point purchasers to local retailers, as an alternative
to being an amazon affiliate. And my company? Well, we avoid amazon.com and its
international cousins (you will see some of our books listed there, but that’s
without our permission). We are keeping it small, local and personal. We love
selling directly to our customers online via our own
websites. (We’d rather save you the shipping charges than give a deep
discount to amazon). And we sell to independent bookstores. (You’ll probably
have to special order from your local store, but I think the wait is worth it.
We have a slow food movement; maybe we now need to think about slow books!)
Sustainability is an interconnection of cultural, social,
economic and environmental practices. It means taking care of where you live…and
part of that involves building strong communities, with healthy, locally-owned
businesses that sell good products at fair prices.
(Oh, and don’t ask me about the magazine
distribution business – my rant would fill a book instead of this
already-too-long blog posting. Let’s just say we’re working on bringing that one
home.)
Posted: 2009/03/07 4:05 PM
Free to Be – November 11, 2008
I just had a chat with my youngest daughter Melanie about the fact that
this is apparently the 35th anniversary of the book Free to Be You
and Me by Marlo Thomas (a birth year that Melanie shares). It was
part of the proliferation of books from that era that opposed gender
stereotypes. But, more than that, it was about saluting values such as
individuality, tolerance and happiness with one’s identity. It became an
Emmy-winning television special and an album featuring such people as
Mel Brooks, Diana Ross, Harry Belafonte, Carol Channing, Tom Smothers,
Rosey Grier, Dick Cavett, Roberta Flack, Alan Alda and more. Oh, and
check out this
video with a very young Michael Jackson…go ahead, you’ll like it
(and there are links to the rest of the video, like
“Mommies are People,” which is one of my favorites.) Marlo
Thomas (perhaps better know as “That Girl” from 1970s television sitcom)
turns 71 in a few weeks – yikes – and is married to the wonderfully
progressive talk show host Phil Donahue. I read the book aloud over and
over again and, apparently, my young daughters took the message in.
Unfortunately, not everybody did and the book and music and their
message are still needed today.
Posted: 2008/11/11 8:30 PM
At the Heart of Education – June 26, 2008
I’ve just begun re-reading
Becoming Human by Jean Vanier, the founder of l’Arche, an international
network of communities for people with intellectual disabilities. He writes
about the need for trust as being key to helping people learn: “The belief in
the inner beauty of each and every human being is at the heart of l’Arche, at
the heart of all true education and at the heart of being human. As soon as we
start selecting and judging people instead of welcoming them as they are – with
their sometimes hidden beauty, as well as their more frequently visible
weaknesses – we are reducing life, not fostering it. When we reveal to people
our belief in them, their hidden beauty rises to the surface where it may be
more clearly seen by all.”
Posted: 2008/06/26 12:34 PM
Mothers and Daughters – June 14, 2008
I am just back from visiting my daughter in her wonderful little house by the
ocean. My reading material on the trip home was
Urgent Message from Mother: Gather the Women, Save the World by Jean
Shinoda Bolen (2005, Conari Press). She writes about the iconic photo of the
earth in space that was taken by the crew of the Apollo space mission in the
late 1960s: “The photograph of Mother Earth could only be taken by astronauts
who were able to get far enough away to see the home planet from a distance.
This is analogous to growing psychologically until we are mature enough to see
our mothers as they are. Until we grow up, we have a self-centered relationship
to our own mother. She is there to do for us, she is seen as it pleases us to
see her, and not as separate from our needs and assumptions. When we
finally are able to see our mother as a person and can love her as she is, we
usually are mature enough to also realize that she may need us.”
Posted: 2008/06/14 12:05 PM
The New Radicals – March 14, 2008
I recently picked up a
book entitled
We Are the New Radicals by Julia Moulden (McGraw-Hill, 2007). The book
documents a phenomenon whereby people go off the career and money track to
contribute to the social good. Some of the people profiled include a London
librarian who left his job to retire to Scotland to record birdlife for the
environmental movement; London Mayor Kehn Livingstone, who at first was
criticized for charging extra for those who congested London traffic but now is
imitated worldwide; Melissa Dyrdahl, who left her job as senior vice president
of marketing at Adobe Systems to create Bring Light, Inc., a nonprofit website
that connects donors with charities; and Chef Jamie Kennedy, who knew that there
was something unsustainable about the way restaurants source ingredients and is
now leading the movement toward local, sustainable cuisine.
Moulden says the new radicals are often boomers who as a
generation already had been part of big social movements such as women’s rights
and who want to continue principled work. The idea makes for a good read, but
there’s nothing new about it. This is also known as social entrepreneurship and
the term was first used in the literature on social change in the 1960s and
‘70s. It was certainly in use in the mid ‘70s when my husband and business
partner Rolf and I went off the money track to start our “new radical/social
entrepreneurship” publishing business. The term came into more widespread use in
the 1980s and ‘90s, promoted by people like Harvard Business School professor
Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Bill Drayton, the founder of
Ashoka..
I believe that all entrepreneurship should be for the good of society, which is
a very radical thought. I fail to see the point of any human enterprise that is
otherwise, meaning that it destroys society, health or the environment. Likewise
for any economic structure or policy that encourage destructiveness. Further, I
think the notion that business=bad and non-profit=good is very out-dated.
But all of this makes me wonder: I’m already a radical, which means I can’t be a
new one. So does that make me an old radical????
Posted: 2000/03/14 11:28 AM
Lightening My Mood to Match My Footprint – January
1, 2008
The global warming warnings are getting heavier by the moment now.
In response, conscientious people are responding to the growing
sense of urgency by lightening up our respective footprints. And
much of the rest of the world’s population – with the notable
exception of North American political leaders – seems likewise
engaged, if polls are to be believed. A recent BBC poll of 22,000
people in 21 countries found that four out of five people are ready
to make serious changes to their lifestyles to address climate
change – even in the United States and China, the world’s two
biggest emitters of carbon dioxide.
Then why is my biggest problem not lightening my
footprint but my mood? I keep wondering if all the sacrifices
individuals are making really matter if governments and industry don’t
stop dithering. And the greenwash gets me down. A few months ago, a PR
firm sent me a whole case full of water in plastic bottles sourced from
a spring in Fiji…accompanied by a press release telling me how it is the
first bottled water brand to go carbon negative...quite a trick if they
are planning to offset all that plastic and other packaging, as well as
the processing and transportation involved with providing something I
can get from my own kitchen faucet. Then I read about how an
eight-passenger SUV won the “Green Car of the Year” award at the Los
Angeles Auto Show. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was quoted
as drooling, “They’ve proven that they can make beautiful cars, strong
cars, keep the size, keep the safety, and all those kinds of things, and
at the same time be more fuel efficient.” Maybe his heart is in the
right place. After all, it is Hollywood. And Hollywood, says
American author, columnist and blogger
Arianna Huffington, “has gone from the capital of conspicuous
consumption to the cutting edge of conspicuous conservation.”
So I’m trying to keep my senses of humor and perspective.
One of the ways I’m doing that is by working on the launch of Life
Media’s third periodical –
Natural Child Magazine, which grew out of the
Natural Child column that has been a feature of Natural Life
for so many years. Starting my own family almost 36 years ago is what
got me on this road to a greener, fairer world, after all. Maybe the
“natural children” in my family and their peers will be able to solve
the problems my generation has created.
Another way that I’m trying to stay hopeful for the
future is by writing and reading. One of the writers whose books I’ll be
exploring more thoroughly this year is a Tibetan Buddhist nun named
Pema Chodron. She is a teacher at Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton, Nova
Scotia, the first Tibetan monastery for Westerners. Her books have
titles that are well suited to these times, including No Time to
Lose, The Places that Scare You, When Things Fall Apart, and
Start Where You Are. And what better place to begin than with a
quote from the latter title: “The best gift you can give yourself is to
lighten up.”
Enjoy 2008 and keep a light heart to accompany your
lightened footprint.
Posted: 2000/01/01 10:25 PM
Sharing the Pleasure of Books – November 19, 2007
I’m always skeptical about reports like the one released today by the
National Endowment for the Arts, suggesting that people (in this
case Americans) are reading less. In spite of the increase in the number
of teen fiction books and the Harry Potter phenomenon, this study claims
that young people are reading fewer books voluntarily and comprehending
less.
Some of my skepticism relates to the fact that computer
use is seen as a villain rather than an alternative source of words to
be read, and that comprehension is based on my old enemy standardized
tests. But I am happy to read that NEA chairman Dana Gioia feels this
supposed decline in reading is an important socio-economic issue and is
calling for changes “in the way we’re educating kids, especially in high
school and college. We need to reconnect reading with pleasure and
enlightenment.” Now there’s an earth-shattering idea!
Of course, it’s an idea that unschoolers have known about
all along. And a couple in Ottawa has created a terrific tool for
families who like to read. It’s a children’s book podcast called Just
One More Book! Three times a week, Andrea Ross and Mark Blevis sit
at a table in their favorite coffee shop and record their conversation
about the children’s books their family (they have two young daughters)
loves and why they love them. They also feature weekly interviews with
authors, literacy related discussions and audio reviews submitted by
listeners. Episodes range in length from five to 30 minutes and can be
played directly from the
website
or downloaded to an iPod for listening on the go. Through this podcast
and its website, this family is building a lively, interactive community
linking children’s book authors, illustrators, readers (parents and
children) and publishers. Here’s to reading for pleasure and
enlightenment! (Oh, and thanks for reading this blog...even if it is not
a book.)
Posted:
2007/11/19 9:05 AM
Learning from the Learners – September 2, 2007
The month I
graduated from teachers’ college – June, 1969 – Herbert Kohl’s book
The Open Classroom (Random House, 1969) was published. I read it
that summer and perhaps it contributed to the frustration I felt in
my first (and last) few months as a classroom teacher. In the book,
Kohl advocates an organic, realistic and less patriarchal approach
to being a teacher in a public school – something that I wasn’t able
to envision, let alone implement, so I resigned, never to teach
school again. And the rest of my educational advocacy career is, as
they say, history. Kohl’s output now numbers more than 40 books,
including I Won’t Learn From You (Milkweed Editions, 1991),
in which he suggests that learning not to learn is a difficult,
intellectual activity that is a manifestation of resistance to
oppression and a sign of a survivor in a hostile environment.
I’ve just finished his latest book, a memoir called
Painting Chinese: A Lifelong Teacher Gains the Wisdom of Youth
(Bloomsbury, 2007). Honestly and humbly, Kohl describes how, late in a
productive life and searching for something new to engage in, he
stumbled into a Chinese painting class…where his fellow students were
all young Chinese children. He writes about studying alongside the
children while reflecting on his life. Painting took on a meditative
quality and helped him come to terms with waning energy and the
cancellation of a beloved university program. But more importantly to
me, the supportive environment and hands-on, noncompetitive learning
process he experienced in the painting classes led him to articulate
things he’s danced around in his long career as writer, educator and
social justice advocate. Kohl’s body of work is focused on helping
teachers fit the square peg of unstructured creative learning into the
round hole of school environments. Learning with children rather than
teaching them has given him a seemingly new perspective. “Children,” he
writes, “when unencumbered by adult demands and channeling educational
structures, are extraordinary watchers and learn through what they see
and experience.”
Posted:
2007/09/02 12:58 PM
A Potholder Hug – August 12, 2007
Recently I’ve noticed that cooking makes me emotional. Or, rather,
cooking certain dishes has that effect on me. The slow and
repetitive pouring, waiting and flipping of pancake preparation on a
Sunday morning inevitably makes me teary-eyed and nostalgic for my
mother’s pancakes at those oh-so-long ago weekend family breakfasts.
And the other day, the fragrant yeast working, miraculous dough
rising and energetic kneading of bread baking brought both a tear
and a smile as I remembered how each of my young daughters
approached that same project in such different ways: Heidi with her
determination and neatness, and Melanie with her playful abandon.
I put this emotionalism down to family circumstances and
my age until I neared the end of the book
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara
Kingsolver. This is the story of how the author’s family documented a
year of procuring as much of their food as possible from neighboring
farms and their own backyard. In one chapter, Kingsolver writes about
how food anchors holiday traditions and how she – somewhat like I – had
subconsciously “spent years denying the good in that.” Fortunately, like
I did, she got over that and now embraces all the food-related
celebrations, including one at the beginning of November called Dia de
los Muertos – the Mexican Day of the Dead. As she describes it, this
entirely happy ritual has its roots in Aztec culture, where the Lady of
the Dead presided over rituals (many food-related) that welcomed dead
friends and ancestors back among the living. Aside from the fact that
Dia de los Muertos seems like a welcome antidote to Hallowe’en, which I
have never enjoyed because it characterizes death as grotesque and
scary, it creates a reason for remembering – a “potholder hug” as
Kingsolver dubs it with her gentle wit. As I read her words: “When I
cultivate my garden I’m spending time with my grandfather, sometimes
recalling deeply buried memories of him,” I realized the source of my
recent kitchen emotionalism. When I’m cooking certain dishes, I am
experiencing the emotions attached to the person who taught me how to
cook a certain dish, or with whom I used to cook it. And I give those
memories a potholder hug.
Posted:
2007/08/12 12:59 PM
A World-Changing Legacy – May 27, 2007
Today, I’ve been thinking about
Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring, the bestselling
book credited with launching the modern environment movement – she is
sometimes called “the mother of environmentalism.” Today (three days
before my birthday) would have been her 100th birthday. Silent Spring
was the first book I read on environmental issues, somewhere around 1972
or 73. It warned of the dangers to ecosystems from the overuse of
pesticides. When the book was published in 1962, Carson, who was a
scientist as well the writer of lyrical prose, was viciously and
personally attacked (as not knowing what she was talking about and for
being a woman and therefore not a real scientist, among other things) by
pesticide manufacturers, including Monsanto. But her words were
eventually given a great deal of credence and the book is credited with
leading to the ban on DDT. Unfortunately, she is once again being
attacked by the conservatives, who are
arguing that the banning of DDT led to unnecessary deaths due to
malaria. Here’s
an interview posted today with her biographer Linda Lear, which
addresses that backlash. Ironically, Carson was fighting breast cancer
while fighting the critics of her book…and she died on April 14, 1964 at
the age of 56 – just one year younger than I am now. Her other books are
perhaps not as well known, but are terrific reads: My favorite is The
Sea Around Us, which won a National Book Award in 1951. Her science
and nature writing was also serialized in magazines. In her book A
Sense of Wonder, she wrote: “Those who dwell, as scientists or
laymen, among the beauties of the earth are never alone or weary in
life…Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of
strength that will endure as long as life lasts.”
Posted:
2007/05/27 8:04 PM
Broadening Their Horizons – February 1, 2007
From time to time, a misguided parent finds what he/she regards as an
objectionable book in their child’s backpack and goes running to the
school or local library with censorship on their mind. The latest
incident that I’ve heard about took place recently in a Toronto suburb.
The Peel Catholic school board has pulled the award-winning novel
Snow Falling on Cedars from high school library shelves after one
parent complained about its sexual content. School officials were quick
to point out that the 12-year-old book, which has been the subject of
controversy and bans in the U.S. as well, hasn’t been banned…although
what else can one call it if the book isn’t available to students?
This is a novel about significant social issues like
racism and morality. Its content is pretty innocuous compared
to what’s available to teens on the Internet and in movies (and the
book was actually made into an Oscar-nominated film.) And there is,
for me, a fascinating irony here. The author is
David Guterson. He was a high school English teacher before he
was able to support himself as a novelist. And, as the father of
four, he was/is a homeschooler whose book Family Matters: Why
Homeschooling Makes Sense was first published in 1992. In it, he
talks about the complete breakdown of our school systems, including
their increasing social irrelevancy. I don’t remember if he talked
about censorship specifically, but his idea of homeschooling (a term
that he said he hoped would disappear from use, a sentiment with
which I heartily agree) is to broaden his children’s horizons, which
includes allowing culture to have a life outside of classrooms. Try
to tell that to the censors...parents and school officials
alike.
Posted:
2007/02/01 11:48 AM
Learning from Living …and Video Games – September 1,
2006
I have been
reading “Everything Bad is Good For You”, a rationale for how
popular culture is making us smarter rather than dumbing us down.
It’s an interesting hypothesis, similar to the article we ran two
years ago in Life Learning by Pam Laricchia entitled
“Everything I Needed to Know I Learned From Video Games.” Book
author Steven Johnson compares the cognitive stimulation of a
ten-year-old 100 years ago to today, which he says includes
“following dozens of professional sports teams; shifting
effortlessly from phone to IM to e-mail in communicating with
friends; probing and telescoping through immense virtual worlds;
adopting and troubleshooting new media technologies without
flinching.” He continues, “Their classrooms may be overcrowded and
their teachers underpaid, but in the world outside of school, their
brains are being challenged at every turn by new forms of media and
technology that cultivate sophisticated problem-solving skills.”
Although Johnson doesn’t say so, this is a great
argument for life learning. There is another not-bad one (plus a plug
for Life Learning magazine) in yesterday’s
Kansas City Star. Thanks to the local unschooling group there, the
members of which I assume passed along our contact info to the reporter.
Posted:
2006/09/01 3:48 PM
September University – July 24, 2006
Yesterday, I
received an update from colleague and occasional Life Learning
contributor Charles Hayes. He is promoting a new way of aging, with the
aim of erasing the notion of retirement from our vocabulary. And he’s
dubbed it “September University.” He writes, “September University…is a
vision of retirement that replaces a time devoted to doing very little
with a time of reflection, when people who’ve entered the September of
life have the opportunity to make their greatest contribution to the
generations to follow. A September University frame of mind means
looking forward to sifting through a half-century or more of experience,
sorting those things that are truly important from those that aren’t,
and finding ways to pass on that wisdom.” His sense is that many people
were so turned-off learning by their formal education experiences that
they avoid the kind of contemplation and knowledge-creation that the
world so badly needs. Hayes has been writing about self-education for
more than two decades. He has published five books on the subject and
one novel. His latest book,
The
Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning, is concerned
with using our knowledge and experience in our later years and leaving
the world a better place in the process. And he has a new book in
progress entitled September University: Rediscover the Wonder of
Existence and Help Change the World. He’s set up an online dialog,
accessible on the
September-U website for people who are interested in exploring the
concept.
Posted:
2006/07/24 5:29 PM
A
Life That Mattered – April 25, 2006
Author, activist (although she preferred to call herself a citizen who
occasionally had to protest stupidity), critic of authority, self-made
economist, intellectual with little formal schooling, Jane Jacobs was
all of those and more. She died this morning in Toronto at age 89. The
world – or at least this part of it – is better for her life and poorer
for her death.
Born in Pennsylvania and later a resident of New York
City, Jacobs moved to Toronto in the late 60s with her family in order
to avoid her sons being drafted into the Viet Nam war. She said later
that she’d fallen out of love with her country. However, while living in
New York, she successfully stopped the construction of a
neighborhood-damaging expressway, and she repeated that activism in
Toronto as one of the leaders of the movement to stop the construction
of the Spadina Expressway, which would have destroyed wide swaths of old
neighborhoods in the downtown part of the city, where she lived until
she died. Her first book, The Death and Life of Great American
Cities, published in 1961, was a bible for urban organizers,
favoring the small scale of low-rise local neighborhoods, which include
both commercial and residential activity. Neither right wing nor left
wing in her “small-p” politics, she favored grassroots action over big
government.
She also, like me, scorned many “isms” and was, I think,
anti-expert, saying more than once that ideologies are blinders. She was
a magnificently successful example of passion and intellectual curiosity
being the road to self-education. Beyond a few courses at Columbia
University, she was self-taught and reportedly turned down many of the
honorary degrees that were offered to her late in life. David Crombie, a
former may or of Toronto and a long-time friend and admirer, has
described her as a “Harvard refusenik.”
A friend of unschooling proponent John Holt, Jane
attended and spoke at a memorial service that some of us organized for
him in Toronto in 1985. Like Holt, she was an authentic thinker who
avoided jargon and questioned received ideas that were presented as
fact. She had a great and creative life, one that mattered in very many
ways. And besides her books and the non-existent freeways, she has left
a huge legacy of ideas. In 1997, the City of Toronto sponsored a
conference entitled “Jane Jacobs: Ideas That Matter.”. One of the
results of the conference was The Jane Jacobs Prize. It includes an
annual stipend of $5,000 for three years to be given to “celebrate
Toronto’s original, unsung heroes – by seeking out citizens who are
engaged in activities that contribute to the city’s vitality.” Upon
announcing her death today, her family issued a statement that read in
part: “What’s important is not that she died but that she lived, and
that her life’s work has greatly influenced the way we think. Please
remember her by reading her books and implementing her ideas.” And, I
would add, by replicating her ever-questioning, independent way of
thinking about the world.
Posted:
2006/04/25 8:08 PM
Trusting Ourselves and Our Children Is Not Regressive – April 1, 2005
Life learning families make choices that differ in some ways from current
societal norms, and therefore sometimes struggle with the tensions and
seeming contradictions inherent in those choices. Giving our children
the honor of learning without schooling is bound to bump up against many
other issues, from how a family makes its living to how the chores get
done.
I have been exploring some of those issues – both in my
own life and in a broader context – as a result of the reader feedback
I’ve been receiving to a recent Life Learning magazine column
(see my March 21, 2005 blog entry – “Learning Neatness”). As part of
that exploration, I am reading a book entitled The Paradox of Natural
Mothering
(2002, Temple University Press). Academic Chris Bobel has
massaged her dissertation into a book that portrays a group of mothers
engaged in homeschooling, natural health care, voluntary simplicity and
various attachment parenting practices. The paradox in the title arises
from what Bobel sees as a conflict between a lifestyle that is both
progressive and regressive (i.e. anti-feminist). While the women she
interviewed feel they are making choices in their lives, Bobel
denigrates these as non-choices that are biologically determined because
they are emotionally-based rather than intellectually thought-out.
(Presumably, if they’d thought about their choices, they’d have behaved
like more conventional mothers!) What these mothers are, in fact, doing
is trusting their emotions, their intuition, their bodies and their
children.
Perhaps our societal agendas have swung us so far away
from the inherent “knowing” that characterizes primitive societies that
so-called “natural parenting” seems to contradict the principles of
equality for women. My own life – and I would say those of the women
Bobel has portrayed – is an ongoing pursuit of the balance between trust
and intellect. Trust, after all, is one of the cornerstones of
non-coercive parenting and life learning. Taking ownership of our own
education and allowing our children to own theirs requires trust in what
we call “human nature”. In the case of our children, that means trusting
that they will behave sociably and want to learn things, including both
academic knowledge and social skills...with our help and example, of
course.
Posted:
2005/04/01 12:10 PM
Learning in Nature – February 16, 2005
I’m reading an
advance proof of a book slated entitled Last Child in the Woods –
Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder. The author is
journalist Richard Louv and the book is scheduled for May
publication by Algonquin Books. While I dislike the idea of labeling
kids as having “disorders”, Louv uses the term as an apt description for
a worrisome phenomenon. His premise is that for the first time in
history, our children’s direct experience in Nature is disappearing –
with disastrous results for the future of our children and the future of
our planet. I will likely choose a piece from it for excerption in
Natural Life magazine. But for now, it has reminded me of my
own early direct experience in Nature, in a tiny corner of the inner
city neighborhood where I grew up.
There was a piece at the back of our backyard that was
bordered on one side by the green wooden wall of a ramshackle garage and
on the opposite side and back by a high (or so it seemed to me at the
time) unpainted wooden fence. Dense foliage from a big, old elm tree
located just beyond the fence in the neighbor’s yard created a
summertime roof. It also meant that the corner was dark and a bit damp,
making it useless for growing grass, roses or petunias, which
constituted my parents’ definition of gardening. So they dumped grass
and hedge clippings there, along with end-of-season annuals, dead roses
and petunias. There were also a couple of fairly large rocks.
Going there was forbidden due to mosquitoes, thorns and
lots of other potential dangers...and some imagined ones too. When I was
young, I obeyed the rule. I am not sure whether the hype convinced me of
the danger or I just hadn’t learned to question authority. But I
remember standing on the grass looking longingly – or perhaps just
curiously – into its shady depths and inhaling the dank smell of
composting greenery.
I also remember the day when I ventured in and sat down
on one of the rocks. It felt wonderful. That feeling was, I suppose, a
combination of rebellious adrenaline and enjoyment of the space. It
seemed protected and cozy, yet retained a hint of danger due to its
“wildness” and forbidden status. Having crossed the barrier, I
subsequently went there often on hot summer days, taking a book and my
day dreams. Sometimes my feelings of anger or frustration also
accompanied me, to be left buried under the decaying grass. It was a
deliciously private place, and a healing one too. Eventually, as I got
too big to sit comfortably on the rock, I dragged a lawn chair there.
But I never felt that the chair belonged; it was too much civilization
in my wilderness. My mother must have noticed the chair but, oddly, I
don’t recall if she put an end to my visits or not. Perhaps I outgrew
that private place, replacing solitude with boys and broader horizons.
But as my first taste of Nature amid asphalt and stucco, it was the
beginning of a life-long reverence for that which is wild, green and
living...and of an understanding of the healing powers of Nature.
Posted:
2005/02/16 11:57 AM
Thinking Big – November 4, 2004
One of the things about being an editor is that I receive lots of books
in the mail. These review copies are both a joy and a problem (what to
do with all the books and when to read them?). I try at least to glance
at all those which appear to be relevant to my work. And last night I
dipped into a small paperback with the simple name Anyway (2004,
Berkley Books) because its subtitle included the words “Finding Personal
Meaning in a Crazy World”. This week I’ve been thinking that the world
is a bit crazier than usual.
Author Kent M. Keith has reclaimed some writing he’d
done in university that had taken on a life of its own via the
Internet. His ten “Paradoxical Commandments” are thoughts like:
“Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank
anyway.” and “The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can
be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.” and “People are illogical, unreasonable, and
self-centered. Love them anyway.”
Most of us have self-centered or even narcissistic
people in our lives and probably find it a challenge to love them
anyway. These folks – Keith calls them “small people” – see things
solely in terms of their own power, comfort or convenience. Now, a
little self-interest is a good thing, and some people – women who
grew up a generation ago, especially – struggle with the problem of
being self-sacrificing to a fault. But “small people” believe that
what is best for them is also best for their families, organizations
or communities. In other words, their lives are no bigger than their
immediate wants, needs and fears and they are often threatened by
big ideas.
The founding fathers of the United States had a big idea
for a democratic country populated with independent individuals. Susan
B. Anthony and Martin Luther King Jr. had big ideas about the equality
of women and blacks. I hope that fear hasn’t permanently sidelined or
skewed those big ideas in America. In a globalized world, the lives of
Americans are, indeed, much bigger than their immediate wants, needs and
fears. Another great American, Henry David Thoreau, asked a pertinent
question: “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look
through each other’s eyes for an instant?” Good advice for both those
Americans who are happy with the results of the U.S. presidential
election and those in America and the rest of the world who aren’t.
Posted:
2004/11/04 11:17 AM
Or Are They Growing Up Too Slowly? – August 9, 2004
Many of us know
20-somethings who are returning home to live with their parents...or we
know (or are) the parents. An article in the July/August of
Utne
magazine calls these young people “adultescents” and quotes a year-old
article in Psychology
Today that blames the phenomenon on Baby Boomer parents who
don’t want their adult children to grow up. These “permaparents” are
supposedly impeding their adult offspring’s independence as a selfish
extension of their manic parenting style. And yup, there are books on
the topic too, such as All
Grown Up: Living Happily Ever After with Your Adult Children
by Roberta Maisel.
So
which trend is it anyway?? Parents rushing their kids into adulthood
before they’re ready (see yesterday’s rant, below) or parents not
allowing them to grow up? Can’t be both at the same time.
Let’s just listen to our kids and our hearts; ignore the trends, the
fads and...this is heresy coming from a writer...the books; respect our
kids for the individuals they are; stop beating ourselves up for not
being perfect parents; and enjoy ourselves and our families. Now there’s
a concept!
Posted:
2004/08/09 5:58 PM
At Their Own Speed – August 8, 2004
Yesterday, our
youngest daughter left for her 2000 km-away home after a two-week visit.
As always when a visit with one of our daughters ends, I have been
thinking about their childhoods. By all accounts, those years, when they
learned without school and we traveled often and far, were fun and
carefree. They learned easily and joyfully, were stable and responsible
children, and grew at their own comfortable speed into successful, happy
adults. Watching them grow up reinforced my belief that our society
expects too little of children, refusing to respect their rights and
neglecting to listen to their opinions.
But chatting with
our daughter this
past week, some concerns that have been lurking just under my
consciousness began to surface. I began to wonder if their father
and I could have done better (don’t we all?!) especially in terms of
helping them make the transition to adulthood. Did they really
grow up at their own speed, or did we expect too much from them too soon
because – like most alternatively-educated and attachment-parented kids
– they seemed sophisticated and confident at a relatively early age?
In his book
The Hurried Child, David Elkind writes that in blurring the
boundaries of what is age appropriate, by expecting or imposing too much
too soon, we force our kids to grow up too fast. But what, I argued with
myself this morning, is “age appropriate”? And who decides?
Elkind’s basic premise is that parents have pushed their
children emotionally and intellectually too far, too fast. He says that
today’s parents think of their kids as Superkids, so competent and so
mature that they need adults very little. Why? Because, he believes,
parents, who are building careers, blending families or struggling as
single parents, have no time for child rearing. Having a competent
Superkid relieves these parents of guilt, but it places too much stress
on the children themselves.
British psychologist Terri Apter takes Elkind’s premise
a step farther. In her book
The Myth of Maturity, she argues against the notion that
when children finish high school or college and land a job they
instantly become autonomous, responsible adults. This myth of maturity,
she writes, is harming our kids. While a young person may appear to
function as an adult, in reality they are often in turmoil, depressed
and overwhelmed by life. So instead of withdrawing emotional or
practical support so that their teenager can solve his or her own
problems, Apter says we really should be providing continued guidance
and support, while also requiring respect and independence.
Looking back, I do recall feeling relieved (OK, smug
too) that my kids seemed to be navigating teenagedom fairly easily.
However, listening to them now, I realize that we probably sometimes
fell off the fine line between expecting too much and too little. And
while never withdrawing emotional support, their father did give them
some not-so-subtle nudges out of the nest. But we didn’t feel any
pressure to go along with the Superkid image out of fear that Heidi and
Melanie would “lag behind”. And as autonomous, responsible children and
teens, they naturally avoided the jolt that happens to the schooled kids
Apter studied. And even though – for whatever reasons – I missed some
things with which I probably could have helped, they
grew quite gracefully into their 20s and now their 30s.
Then, just as I had laid that concern to rest, I went
shopping and noticed a plethora of adult-aimed items – from T-shirts and
purses to tea towels – featuring Care Bears, Hello Kitty, Blues Cues and
various Disney characters. Are young people, I wondered, feeling so
cheated out of childhood that they have this level of nostalgia for
novelties geared to a much younger audience? Are they revisiting the
fantasy world of childhood because the real world is so scary, as an
article in yesterday’s Toronto Star
(one of a recent spate in the mainstream media) suggests? Writes
columnist Margo Varadi, “There comes a point when young people can’t
deal with the anxiety of feeling vulnerable all the time and want to be
reassured.” Hmmm, I thought, as I read that line. There comes a point
when people of all ages can’t deal with the anxiety of feeling
vulnerable and want to be reassured! Maybe we all need a dose of
childhood from time to time just because it’s comforting. Maybe
nostalgia thrives as the world gets scarier.
Posted:
2004/08/08 12:02 PM
Lack of Power – April 21, 2004
Murray Milner Jr., a sociologist at the University of Virginia, says
that the baffling social behavior of so many of today's teenagers is a
reaction to the isolated and powerless role that adults have assigned to
them. Milner is the author of a new book
Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids: American Teenagers, Schools, and the
Culture of Consumption (Routledge, 2004). Through
extensive fieldwork by a team of researchers, he found that the
elaborate social scenes constructed by teenagers are a logical response
to the constraints of their lives. He says that living in a world ruled
and regulated by adults, teenagers have few opportunities to shape the
key features of their lives. And so they exert control over their school
social scene – with a vengeance. “Why this near obsession with status?
It is because they have so little real economic or political power. They
must attend school for most of the day and they have only very limited
influence on what happens there.... They do, however, have one crucial
kind of power: the power to create an informal social world in which
they evaluate one another.”
Milner’s findings also suggest that our consumer society plays an
influential role in the lives of status-conscious teenagers: “Perhaps
the thing that American secondary education teaches most effectively is
a desire to consume,” he writes.
Posted: 4/21/2004 10:24 AM
Learning and Forgetting – April 19, 2004
I’ve been reading a wonderful little book by Frank Smith, entitled
The Book of Learning and Forgetting (Teachers College Press, 1998),
which, by the way, is reviewed in the upcoming
May/June issue of Life Learning. Smith, who was a
reporter, editor and novelist before beginning his formal research into
language, thinking and learning as a Harvard Ph.D. and subsequent
education professor in Canada and South Africa, has a knack for cogent
description of what helps and hinders learning. He believes that
learning is a social process that can occur for people of all ages
naturally and continually through collaborative activities (no news to
most of the people reading this blog!).
In this book, which is one of many
he has written, Smith writes at length about short- and long-term
memory. He explains that the effort to memorize interferes with
memorization because it destroys understanding. Rote memorization, he
says, puts things in the wrong place (i.e. in short-term memory, where
you can only hold onto something for as long as you rehearse it). When
something goes into long-term memory, on the other hand, information is
organized and retrieved on the basis of the sense they make to us. The
way to hold something in long-term memory is – as anyone knows who has
tried to remember a new acquaintance’s name at a cocktail party – to
relate it to something you already know. But, writes Smith, when you are
trying to learn something there is no need to worry about finding
something you can relate the new knowledge to, “because that will take
place automatically if you understand what you are doing.” So, he
recommends, don’t even think about it. “Get on with enjoying what you
are reading – or look around for something else that is [more]
interesting and does makes sense to you.” In short, the more absorbed we
are in an activity, the more we learn about it.
Posted: 4/19/2004 10:41
AM
Teenage Lib Handbook Author Featured – April 12, 2004
Grace Llewellyn, author of the Teenage Liberation Handbook and
founder of the Not Back to School Camp, is featured in an in-depth
profile in the current issue of
Teacher Magazine. It is an interesting read. As Grace told
writer Tracy Aitken in a shorter interview in the current issue of
Life Learning, the underground unschooling classic was not
originally intended for homeschoolers, but to “open up the world if
independent, self-directed learning for school kids”. And she now seems
to be moving on from supporting unschoolers. Her next book is aimed at
supporting teens “who would not or could not leave school”. She is
collecting info for that project and can find a survey to that end on
her website.
Posted: 4/12/2004 3:28 PM
Radical Holt Book Back in Print
– April 4, 2004
Kudos to Sentient
Publications
for reviving – intact – what I think is John Holt’s best book,
Instead of Education – Ways to Help People do Things Better. Holt,
of course, believed in learning by doing and coined the term
“unschooling”. But in addition to being an educational reformer, he was
also a social reformer. And this book, while not as well known as
How Children Learn, How Children Fail, and Teach Your
Own, may be his most radical. Originally published in 1976,
Instead of Education lays the framework for unschooling as the path
to self-directed learning and a creative life. It is both an indictment
of state-run schools (what he calls “S-chools”) and a description of a
variety of learning opportunities outside of conventional schools,
including personal learning schedules, independent study programs,
community learning exchanges and co-ops, and resources like museums and
libraries. But more radically, it includes strategies for helping kids
escape compulsory schooling, both legally and in defiance of truancy
laws – including the creation of an “underground railroad” for school
leavers. While the homeschooling movement has matured in 30 years,
unfortunately, Holt’s indictment of S-chools rings as true as ever.
Posted: 4/4/2004 5:26 PM
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